Metal Materials For 2d Artists
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Oct 19th 2025
Software: Any

Every material, whether wood, plastic or metal, have different visual qualities. As an artist, we need to capture these visual qualities if we want people to be able to tell that an object in our art is made from a specific material, and this is true regardless of whether your work is photoreal or highly stylized. In this tutorial, we will explore the visual properties of metal and how to best create them in 2d, from more realistic to very stylized.

Visual Properties Of Metal

Here's a photo of a real metal toy...



When it comes to the visual properties of metal, the look of metal is primarily 2 parts, a base color (diffuse reflection) and it's shininess (specular reflection). In metals, the specular reflection is far more prominent than the diffuse reflection, making it easier to tell the difference between say metal and plastic. Both metal and plastic have specular reflections, but they look quite different. For more info on reflections, see my tutorial on Material Properties For 2D and 3D Artists



Here's the recipe for metal...

Metal Ball



The Environment the metal ball is sitting in, and hence is reflecting

While the specular reflection is usually stronger than plastic, it can be comparatively stronger or weaker, and sharper of more blurry, depending on the type of metal.
Most metals fall somewhere on this spectrum...



So now that you know a bit about how metals look in real life, lets talk about making them in 2d.

Painting Realistic Metal

If you're going for something in the realistic to painterly area, your goal is to replicate what happens in the real world. For that, here's a procedure for painting metal that works in any 2d paint program (for this example, I'll use Photoshop but these features exist in pretty much any paint software).

Let's paint a simple cylindrical style piece of metal, say something like the upper part of the glove of a medieval knight.


Armor for Gustav I of Sweden by Kunz Lochner

I'll start with a plain grey shape.



Add some reflections of the environment. If your object is in a specific environment, consider using that, if not, a set of white and black stripes will usually do.



I usually place the stripes on a new layer above the grey, use the shape as a clipping mask, and then reduce the new layer's opacity to mix it with the grey color.





This looks good, but the stripes don't follow the surface very well, they go perfectly up and down while the surface is curved. So I use a transform tool to warp the stripe layer a bit so it fits the shape of the cylindrical object...





Now on a new layer, clipping to the shape, paint a highlight in white with a sharp brush. Make sure your highlight is placed on the correct spot of the surface depending on where your bright light is in your scene. For this example, lets say the sun is right behind the camera, so the highlight will be right in the center middle...



Now on a new layer use a blurry brush colored white and paint around the highlight to make it glow...



Play around with the contrast of your metal to get some more blacks in there...



Check some reference, and see how well you did...



Remember, if you want more worn metal, increase the blur on your highlight and reflections layers, then reduce their opacity so the shine isn't as bright...



And if you want it to feel even more worn, consider painting some dirt on top using a Dirt Brush or adding a photo texture of scratches and dirt over top...



Now when people see this object, they'll immediately think metal, and not just some sort of grey plastic.

Painting Stylized Metal

When painting cartoony or stylized metal, say for anime, you should follow a similar formula, except make the results sharper and simplified.

Here's some examples showing metals in a more cartoony way.

The simplest is to just use a flat grey color to indicate metal. Works in some situations, but may be a little too simple.



Here's an example from the anime Full Metal Alchemist. This is more complex, where the armor has a grey color, but then stripes of darker grey and lighter grey.



Similar with Naruto Uzumaki...



You may wonder why the metal in anime tends to be this simplified? It's mostly because animating metal objects in 2d is a pain. Remember, it's reflecting the environment. That means, if the metal object moves, the reflection stays aligned with the environment. So the reflection will move across the object, it won't stay locked to the object. So this adds extra difficulty and hence cost when animating. So most of the time reflections are super simplified to reduce the time it takes to paint them while still feeling like metal. If you're making still images, you can make your metal more complex because your object won't be moving.

Here's a little more complex metal from Legend of Korra...



and the character Erza Scarlet...



You can see the sword has many grey, white and dark grey stripes along its surface, which gives it that metal feel.

So lets start again with that grey surface...



Add some darker stripes on another layer, but make them more hard edge by painting them with a hard edged brush...



Now paint a highlight stripe in brighter grey, I've added a bit of a random shape here to add variety...



Then paint with the same hard edge brush a brighter highlight in the center...



Then maybe play with the contrast to get some brighter brights and darker darks.



One last little bit, I add two hard edge lines showing the metal folding over at the top and bottom to create lips...



To make it even more realistic, I adjust the reflection on the two lips to make it slightly different than the main part of the shape. Different surfaces will have slightly different reflections.



If you want metal that looks more worn, you can't blur it like you did with the realistic metal, but just make all of your stripes, especially the highlight stripe, a lot fatter, then reduce their brightness.

Conclusion

Hopefully this helps you the next time you want to paint metal in 2d.

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